Hex Appeal

by P. N. Elrod

  The Navajo whispered among themselves.

  He walks in darkness.

  He is the night.

  Born of smoke.

  Death.

  Beasts.

  Magic.

  I think we’d found our man.

  We stood there for hours, waiting for the fire to die. We couldn’t see anything through the thick, choking smoke. We also didn’t hear anything but the crackle of the flames, and we didn’t smell anything but burning wood and acrid fumes.

  That should have tipped me off right away. Nothing burns without screaming. Nothing dies without moving. Nothing turns to ashes without one hell of an unpleasant smell.

  Eventually, the Navajo climbed into their vehicles and drove away. They didn’t seem concerned about us. Considering the lack of evidence left behind, they didn’t need to be.

  When the last dusty pickup disappeared into the sun that hovered just above the western horizon, Jimmy spoke. “Now what?”

  “Now we douse that fire, then bury whatever’s left in at least four different places.”

  Jimmy’s shoulders slumped on a sigh. “Okay.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “I wanted to kick some ass.”

  Behind him, the ashes rippled. The red embers glowed brighter and brighter, then gave a subtle whoosh.

  “We might have to,” I murmured.

  Jimmy spun as the pyre reignited, shooting as high as some of the oldest trees. The flames themselves became a man, then the man became a wolf, a mountain lion, a writhing snake. Every time I blinked, the image re-formed—now a hawk, next a tarantula, and, once again, a man.

  “Shape-shifter.” Jimmy’s silver blade sliced the heated air.

  “Worse,” I said, as the blazing man walked out of the inferno completely unharmed. “He’s a skinwalker. That fire only pissed him off.”

  As he stalked toward us, his long, dark hair streamed back, the coming night air causing the flames that still licked at the ends to extinguish with an audible poof. He glistened in the dying sun, the tattoos that graced nearly every inch of his body seeming to dance as muscles rippled beneath his skin.

  He wasn’t tall; he didn’t need to be. The power, or maybe it was the fury, cascaded off him with such force the grass beneath his feet curdled and died.

  “Should we run?” Jimmy asked.

  The man approaching us smiled. The expression frightened me. But Sawyer always had.

  I stepped in front of Jimmy, my arm lifting to make use of my magic. Sawyer flicked his hand. He was still five feet away; he never touched me, yet I flew off my feet and landed fifty yards south. If I’d been human, the force of the fall would have fricasseed my brains. Instead, I was up and running almost instantly.

  I was too late. I’d known even while I was still airborne that I would be.

  Jimmy plunged the silver switchblade into Sawyer’s chest. When Sawyer didn’t burst into ashes, Jimmy took a step back, but he didn’t run. Maybe he should have.

  Except Sawyer could shift in an instant; he could move faster than the eye could track. There was no point in running. Jimmy’s fate had been sealed long before now.

  Sawyer lowered his head to look at the knife. He seemed calm enough, but the pyre behind him suddenly ignited all the way to the sky. Then, as quick as the lightning he commanded, Sawyer yanked the knife from his own chest and plunged it into Jimmy’s.

  Even as I shouted, “No!” I was wondering—

  Of all the times I’d seen Jimmy die, why hadn’t I ever seen this?

  Jimmy collapsed to his knees, then tumbled onto his side. Sawyer tilted his head like the hawk tattooed at the base of his spine, staring at the dying man before him. Blood trickled down his bare chest, glistening in the glow of the dancing flames. But there was less blood than there should have been. His wound had already begun to heal.

  I fell to the ground, tugging Jimmy onto his back. Someone was chanting, “No, no, no.” I think it was me.

  His eyes were closed, his face more gray than pale, his lips white. All the blood in the world seemed to be darkening his once mint green shirt.

  The panic in my head, the utter devastation in my heart was the same panic and devastation that had swamped me upon awakening from every dream where Jimmy had died.

  Sawyer’s hand appeared, reaching for the knife, and I sprayed glitter dust without thought, coating him from knuckle to neck.

  “Don’t touch him,” I said, and beneath my usual voice, rumbled a beast of my own. I was going to kill him. As soon as I figured out how. “Never touch him again.”

  Sawyer squatted on the other side of Jimmy’s body. “If you want him to heal,” he said in a voice that was so deep it rumbled the mountain, “you need to take out the knife.”

  I lifted my gaze. My magic still clung to his skin, but it did nothing to stop him from snatching the blade and yanking it out. He stuck his fingers into the hole the knife had left in the shirt and yanked, exposing Jimmy’s chest, slick with blood, and the two-inch slice in his skin, which had just begun to close. Not as fast as Sawyer’s—his was nearly gone—but fast enough.

  “Who is he?” Sawyer asked. “From the way you were keening, I’d guess him to be your long-lost love.”

  I kept my gaze on Jimmy’s face, but I felt my own burn. “I just met him yesterday.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Ruthie sent him.” I frowned. “To kill you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You don’t think Ruthie would kill you?”

  Sawyer laughed, and the sound seemed to flow from those mountains and not his mouth. “If only she knew how. If only anyone did.”

  “But he—” I began.

  “He’s a dhampir,” Sawyer interrupted. “And a vampire I am not.”

  “I know what he is.”

  Jimmy’s face was less gray but still pale. The knife wound continued to knit together slower than I’d like. Of course, I’d like never to have been there in the first place, but I’d learned, way back at the Fall, that what I liked meant nothing at all.

  “If that were the case, you would have known better than to think a simple knife to the chest would end him.”

  I blinked. He was right. But I’d seen Jimmy die so many times in so many ways, I’d panicked.

  “I still don’t understand why Ruthie would send him to kill you.”

  “She didn’t,” Sawyer said slowly, as if I’d hit my head when he’d tossed me. Maybe I had. Because none of this was making any more sense now than it had before. Unless—

  I tilted my head, eyes narrowing. “This was a test?”

  Sawyer lifted his bare shoulder—the one where a black wolf howled.

  Seemed like a fairly easy test to me. Although Ruthie probably hadn’t expected Sawyer to be on fire when we arrived.

  Jimmy’s eyes fluttered, then opened. I smiled. “Hey,” I began.

  A spark of red flared at their center, and he reached out quick as any beast, grabbing Sawyer’s ankle and yanking him to the ground. An instant later, he landed on Sawyer’s chest, wrapped both hands around his throat, and began to squeeze.

  Sawyer just looked bored.

  “Jimmy.” I pulled on his hands. I was strong; he was stronger. So I hit him with a faceful of fairy dust, and whispered, “Stop.”

  He did.

  Sawyer shoved him off and stood.

  “What’d you do that for?” Jimmy wiped the sticky sparkles from his eyes. “And why’d it work?”

  “He’s—” I paused. What Sawyer was had always been a mystery.

  “I’m one of you,” Sawyer finished.

  “No way in hell,” Jimmy returned as he climbed to his feet.

  “Her magic made you stop. Would it have if I were evil? If you were actually supposed to kill me? Not that you could, but if I have to keep flicking you off, I might hurt you.”

  “Nothing can hurt me.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Let’s see what you got.”

&
nbsp; “No.” I stepped between them again, setting one hand on Jimmy’s chest, ignoring the dual sensations of “ick” from all the blood and “yum” from all the muscles. “He’s dangerous.

  Jimmy lifted his chin. “So am I.”

  “Not like him.”

  Jimmy stared Sawyer up and down—which was pretty easy considering he still wore nothing but tattoos—sneering a bit at the snake inked on his penis. “Is that a joke?” he asked.

  Sawyer smirked.

  “He’s a skinwalker,” I repeated.

  “A shifter. So what?”

  “If he was just a shifter, he’d be ashes. He can change into anything with the use of his robe.”

  “Robe?” Jimmy gave Sawyer another scornful once over. “Did it burn off?”

  “My skin is my robe,” Sawyer murmured. And he could become any of the beasts that he wore there.

  “He was created in fire, birthed of smoke,” I continued. “He controls the lightning. He can bring the storm.”

  “How do we kill him?” Jimmy asked.

  “He’s one of the most powerful sorcerers ever known. There is no killing him.”

  Jimmy’s eyes widened. “Everything that breathes can die.”

  “Everything but him.”

  “Why would Ruthie—” he began.

  “She didn’t,” Sawyer interrupted. “This was your test, boy. You failed.”

  “Failed?” Jimmy waved at Sawyer’s still-bloody chest. “I got you.”

  “Not as good as I got you.”

  Honestly. I gave a mental eye roll. Men. Boys. Ancient supernatural creatures. The only difference was the size of their—

  Jimmy’s switchblade suddenly appeared once more in his hand. He must have palmed it while still on the ground. I was impressed. Annoyed as hell. But also impressed.

  He flicked his wrist, and the dying sun sparked off the edge as it opened. “Let’s go again.”

  “No,” I said, and when Jimmy moved, I growled, the sound surprising him enough to make him pause. “Do not make me spray you.”

  “You’re taking his side?”

  “We’re on the same side.”

  “If that’s true, then why were all those people…” Jimmy curled his lip, “his people, roasting him? He must have done something to set them off.”

  “It makes them feel better to burn me every generation or so.” Sawyer shrugged. “I let them.”

  “You let them?” Jimmy snorted. “Sure you did.”

  “You think mere humans could capture me?” Sawyer gave a delicate snort of his own. “They’ve seen me become my animals, watched me turn humans to ashes—”

  “Why did they see you?”

  Sawyer spread his hands. “Why not?”

  “It adds to his legend,” I said. “Makes people fear him. Probably keeps them from burning him more than once a generation.”

  “When they watch me die, then they see me a day, a week, a month later unharmed…” Sawyer didn’t exactly grin—I doubt he could—but his oddly light gray eyes sparkled. “It’s one of the few things that amuses me after all these years.”

  “How many years?” Jimmy asked suspiciously.

  “Sawyer’s as old as I am,” I said. “Maybe older.”

  “This is Sawyer?”

  Something in Jimmy’s voice made me turn, but he was already past me. I should have taken away that damn knife when I had the chance.

  The blade descended, headed straight for Sawyer’s eye, but while Jimmy was fast, Sawyer was faster, and he snatched Jimmy’s wrist, giving it a quick, vicious twist. The sound of the bone snapping warred with the thud of the knife against the ground and my own startled gasp.

  Jimmy let his injured hand flop at his side as he stepped in close. “She sobs your name in her sleep, you son of a bitch. What did you do to her?”

  “What didn’t I?” Sawyer whispered, then flicked one hand through the air as if batting a fly.

  By the time Jimmy landed, and I’d run to him, Sawyer was gone. I don’t know if he shape-shifted, or ran off on his own bare feet. Maybe he just went poof—with him, anything was possible. In truth, I didn’t care how he’d gone, I was just glad that he’d gone.

  “You okay?” I asked, but Jimmy was already getting up.

  He stared at the place Sawyer had recently stood; the only indication that the man had been real and not a mirage was the imprints of his toes in the dust.

  “I don’t care what he is.” Jimmy retrieved his knife. The wrist Sawyer had broken still hung limply at his side, but the fingers had begun to move, curling into a fist I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d made. “I’m gonna kill him someday.”

  Only one thing could make men—even those who weren’t completely men—behave like this.

  “Who is she?” I asked, proud when my voice didn’t break even though my heart was.

  Stupid to feel betrayed. I might have known Jimmy Sanducci intimately for eons, but he’d only met me yesterday. And, from the way he’d said she, another had already captured his heart.

  “No one,” he murmured in a voice that clearly said the one.

  He walked to the car and got in without glancing my way at all.

  * * *

  I pulled into the first motel I saw, a small, single-wing, once-white place with a neon sign that announced SLEEP EAP. It wasn’t until I parked beneath it that I saw that the C and the H had burned out.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  Those were the first words Jimmy had said in the hour we’d been on the road.

  “I’m tired.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “If a cop sees you behind the wheel like that…” I waved at his torn and bloody shirt, his even bloodier chest.

  “You’ll magic them, and we’ll keep right on going.”

  “It’s easier to stop here, take a shower and a nap, start fresh in the morning.” Besides, I’d magicked so many people today, my hands hurt.

  I figured he’d argue, so when he laid his head against the seat and closed his eyes, I palmed the keys and got us a room. There was no way I was letting Jimmy out of my sight until he was back under Ruthie’s thumb. I wouldn’t put it past him to sneak away in the middle of the night and try to kill Sawyer again.

  Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t wait for the middle of the night. By the time I got back to the car, he was gone.

  “Fuck!” I kicked the tire. I should have put a leash on him.

  I looked up and down the road, but in the middle of nowhere, even with fairy eyesight, the highway disappeared into a black maw of nothing after a few hundred feet.

  I honestly had no idea which way to go, or even if I should go. Jimmy was a big boy. He wasn’t my responsibility.

  No matter how much I might want him to be.

  I turned toward the motel and got a shimmy of déjà vu so hard I staggered. I’d dreamed this.

  The Impala right there, the hotel in front of me. Jimmy was gone. I was worried. Everything was the same, right down to the ache in my fingers, except …

  The sign had been off—black and still—not flickering like it was now.

  In the next instant, the neon died with a sizzling phzaat. Darkness settled over me like a cool spring mist. I held my breath and waited for reality to catch up with the dream.

  The animal-like shriek rent the night, and I lifted into the air without benefit of wings.

  I flew toward the scream, already knowing what I would find.

  A cottage miles away from the nearest neighbor, at the end of what would have passed for a decent road in the year 2, the night so dark the figures that surrounded it were mere wisps darting in and out of the light that shone from the windows.

  One man battled a multitude of hunched and decrepit crone-things, with tails like dinosaurs and bony, bald heads. Despite their ancient appearance, they moved fast, and they had very sharp teeth. It wasn’t until one of them bleated like a goat that I remembered what they were.

  Chupacabras.

  Mexi
can vampires. The stench of rancid garlic was so strong, my eyes watered. Jimmy had probably smelled them from the car.

  He seemed to be doing just fine on his own. Ashes flitted through the dim light. He whirled and jabbed, plunging a wooden stake into chest after naked, scaly chest.

  However, I’d been here before, and I knew what happened. The king chupacabra—a much bigger, badder vampire, with spikes down his spine and gigantic bat wings—would swoop from the sky and drive first his right talon, then his left, through Jimmy’s throat.

  I snatched up a likely sliver of wood from the pile next to the cottage and began to watch the sky.

  Something bleated, and I lashed out, my stake sinking into the chest of the creature that had rushed me. Instead of bursting into ashes, the thing bleated again, a long, hiccoughing expulsion that sounded like laughter, then sank its fangs into my wrist.

  I cursed and cuffed the chupacabra upside its bony, bald head. Instead of releasing me, it began to suck.

  And from the east, the slow thunk of wings.

  Panic threatened. How would I kill the beast coming for Jimmy if I couldn’t even end one of its minions?

  Think, Summer! What kills a goatsucker?

  If Ruthie had sent me here, she’d have given me more info, or I’d have found some on the way. But Ruthie hadn’t sent me. My dream had.

  So I tried to bring that dream to mind, but all I could see when I closed my eyes were the talons going through Jimmy’s throat.

  “Cross!” Jimmy shouted.

  I opened my eyes, just as the clouds parted enough to reveal a thin sickle of a moon, the light fluttering off and on as the wings of something large and deadly hovered.

  Using my free hand, I yanked the stake from the chupacabra and plunged it across to the other side of his chest.

  Nothing happened, except that he laughed again, this time the sound not much more than a gargle of my blood in his throat. I threw some dust in his face, and said, “Release me.”

  When he did, I retrieved my stake and flew. I’d throw myself in front of Jimmy. Maybe during the time the king goatsucker was trying to kill me, Jimmy could kill him.

  But as I flew, another idea of what cross might mean occurred to me. I used my thumbnail to carve one into the wood.

  I reached Jimmy as the gargantuan chupacabra materialized from the night. His talons went through my chest as my stake went into his.